The Art and Politics of 'Zero Dark Thirty'

The man behind the film about the hunt for bin Laden talks about how he combined facts with imagination and calls his Senate critics 'intellectually dishonest.'

By

Matthew Kaminski

Updated Feb. 15, 2013 7:15 p.m. ET

Los Angeles

Ahead of the Academy Awards next Sunday, the ads and mailers for "Lincoln," "Argo" and "Silver Linings Playbook" resemble a political campaign. Then there's "Zero Dark Thirty." Nominated for best picture and in four other categories, the account of the manhunt for Osama bin Laden is caught in a real-life political storm.

"Zero Dark Thirty"—directed by Kathryn Bigelow and produced by Mark Boal—is as divisive and charged as any Hollywood film in memory. "The Hurt Locker," their film about the Iraq war, won six Oscars in 2009 and broad acclaim. This time the pair are having to defend their work against political attack—in Hollywood and Washington. The controversy has pushed the film, an early Oscar front-runner that has grossed nearly $100 million so far, out of the conversation about likely winners.

ENLARGE

Ken Fallin

Watch the trailer from the film "Zero Dark Thirty," a chronicle of the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden, and his death at the hands of the Navy S.E.A.L. Team 6 in May 2011. (Photo/Video: Sony)

"Our movie was hijacked for political purposes," says Mr. Boal, who wrote the script based on his own reporting. One of the movie's Oscar nominations is for best original screenplay. Over a late lunch in Venice Beach earlier this week, the 40-year-old native New Yorker is funny, impassioned, defensive and irritated, sometimes in the same sentence.

Hints of trouble came early. After bin Laden's killing in May 2011, the Bigelow-Boal team shelved a planned film about the failure to capture the al Qaeda leader at Afghanistan's Tora Bora in late 2001 and jumped instead on the successful raid. Mr. Boal worked his sources at the CIA and elsewhere. Republican Rep. Peter King complained that a film made with CIA help might reveal confidential information and help President Obama's re-election campaign. Originally scheduled for an October 2012 release, "Zero Dark Thirty" was pushed past Election Day to Christmas. But then, when the film came out, it was liberals' turn to be outraged by the movie's depiction of CIA "enhanced interrogation techniques."

"In addition to providing false advertising for waterboarding, 'Zero Dark Thirty' endorses torture in several other subtle ways," wrote Jane Mayer in the New Yorker. In the Guardian, Naomi Wolf called Ms. Bigelow "an apologist for evil" and compared her to Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's favorite documentarian. Actors Ed Asner and David Clennon started a campaign to deny any Academy Awards for "Zero Dark Thirty."

Washington politicians joined in. Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Carl Levin and Republican Sen. John McCain sent a letter in mid-December to the CEO of Sony Pictures, which distributed and promoted the film. "Zero Dark Thirty" is "grossly inaccurate and misleading," the senators wrote, urging Sony to "please consider correcting the impression that the CIA's use of coercive interrogation techniques led to the operation against Usama Bin Laden. It did not." Democrats on Ms. Feinstein's intelligence committee had just completed a classified investigation into CIA interrogation that reached the same conclusion.

In two separate letters to the acting head of the CIA, the Capitol Hill trio demanded to know if the filmmakers "could have been misled" by the agency about the efficacy of the interrogations. The lawmakers asked for "records of the meetings that occurred, notes, internal emails, Sametime [sic] communications and other documentation describing CIA interactions with the filmmakers."

The Senate investigators haven't contacted Mr. Boal or Ms. Bigelow, but last month Mr. Boal retained Jeffrey H. Smith, a prominent Washington lawyer. "They're just investigating the origins of a work of art," says Mr. Boal. Turning serious, he calls the letters "a mischaracterization" of the film "and intellectually dishonest."

The "Zero Dark Thirty" title sequence says that the movie is "based on firsthand accounts of actual events," and it opens with authentic audio recordings of people trapped in the World Trade Center towers moments before their collapse. Cut two years later to a CIA "black site" prison.

"I own you, Ammar," Daniel Stanton, the agency's man in Pakistan, tells an al Qaeda prisoner. Maya, a young CIA agent who is the film's heroine, watches. This is her first interrogation. An al Qaeda money man, Ammar is beaten up and waterboarded. The pair learn nothing.

The decade-long manhunt gets compressed into 2½ hours, culminating with the SEAL Team Six nighttime raid on bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Maya and her colleagues miss clues, suffer setbacks, chase down false leads and fight internal battles over resources and strategy. She pushes one lead hardest: To find bin Laden, the U.S. needs to identify and find his most trusted courier, the real Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. The film suggests that some information about al-Kuwaiti came indirectly as a result of harsh interrogations.

Mr. Boal is offering no apologies. "I think it's my right, by the way, if I firmly believe that bin Laden was killed by aliens, to depict that. And I should be able to put on there, 'This is 100% true and anyone who doubts it is themselves abducted by aliens' . . . without a Senate investigation into where I got that notion. Right? In this country, isn't that legit?"

As some film critics outside the Senate noted, "Zero Dark Thirty" doesn't claim that information obtained from harsh interrogations was central to the manhunt. The interrogations are, however, portrayed graphically and at length. Ali Soufan, a former FBI counterterrorist agent and author of "The Black Banners," says the movie leaves a false impression about their effectiveness. He and former Bush administration officials also say the abuse was never as bloody as shown on film.

On torture, Mr. Boal reverts to the factual default of a working journalist he once was. (Raised in Greenwich Village, he began his journalism career at the Village Voice and has written for Playboy, Rolling Stone and Mother Jones in parallel with his career in film.) "If you left that out, you'd be whitewashing history," he says. "Those things happened. They were done by Americans, some lawfully, some not." The White House approved, the Justice Department wrote the legal memos, Congress was briefed. Waterboarding was stopped by the middle of the Bush era, and President Obama closed the CIA's interrogation unit.

"I didn't support them, I didn't say I think they were moral, I have no idea if they were effective or not," says Mr. Boal. "My job as a storyteller is to be as honest as I can be with the underlying materials."

"Ammar" is a composite character largely based on Ammar al-Baluchi, the real-life nephew of al Qaeda leader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—both of whom are imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. According to Mr. Boal, the real Ammar was one of the captured al Qaeda fighters who helped lead the U.S. to the courier al-Kuwaiti, which in the film happens over a quiet meal. The real Ammar wasn't waterboarded, but that's why he's a composite, says the writer.

In another of Ammar's brutal interrogation scenes, however, he reveals no information about an imminent plot in Saudi Arabia. Cut to bearded Arab men laying siege to an apartment house in Khobar on May 29, 2004. "Cinematically—and I don't think these guys are critics and know what the f--- they're talking about—but cinematically it's not a case for the efficacy of torture to show them trying to prevent an attack and then the attack happens," Mr. Boal says.

"Now does that mean they can use the movie as a political platform to talk about what they've been wanting to talk about for years and years and years? Do I think that Feinstein used the movie as a publicity tool to get a conversation going about her report? I believe it," he says, referring to the intelligence committee's report on enhanced interrogations.

The senators' letter to Sony revealed another motive. Democrats had won the policy debate on terrorist interrogation and detention. But the senators wrote that polls show "a narrow majority of Americans" believe torture can be justified as a legitimate way to gather intelligence. "Zero Dark Thirty," they wrote, "has the potential to shape American public opinion in a disturbing and misleading manner." They don't want to reopen the debate.

"Let's be honest, what are we really going to do the next time there is a ticking time bomb situation?" says Mr. Boal, referring to a scenario of a suspect who might know of an imminent terrorist attack and isn't willing to talk. "I don't think that issue has really been resolved."

The film includes references to the 2005 terrorist attacks in London and five years later the foiled bombing in Times Square. Those scenes were interspersed to "bring home the real stakes" for the covert operatives, says Mr. Boal. "It's convenient to dismiss [the operatives] politically as either killers or spawned of Satan, but the truth is they're Americans faced with a job for which they get little credit from the press, for which they get little pay, and which is about life and death," he says. "When they make a mistake, people die."

One of the film's supporters is none other than Leon Panetta, the former CIA director portrayed in the film by James Gandolfini. The Feinstein letters cited Mr. Panetta's past statements about torture to criticize the film. "It's a good movie," Mr. Panetta told Agence France Presse in an interview this month. "There's no question that some of the intelligence gathered was a result of those efforts," he said, referring to the enhanced interrogations. "But I think it's difficult to say that they were the critical element. I think they were part of the vast puzzle that you had to put together in order to ultimately locate where bin Laden was."

"Zero Dark Thirty" is also unusual for a film in that it is an exercise in breakneck investigative reporting. No book was available to option and adapt, so Mr. Boal had to dig for real-life details that would dramatize one of the most important events of the decade. In so doing the movie raises questions about Hollywood's obligation to tell the truth in fiction—for example, can a film demand to be taken seriously as a work of journalism and entertainment?

"I'm not trying to have it both ways. It is both ways," Mr. Boal says. "Saying it's a movie is a fair and accurate description. Saying it's a movie based on firsthand accounts is a fair and accurate description. That's what gives it its power."

"Zero Dark Thirty" fictionalized some events and people to keep the story moving as well as to keep sources and U.S. operations safe. He says he won't say if he met the real-life Maya to protect his sourcing. As in the film, Maya's CIA colleague in Khost, Afghanistan, did bake a birthday cake for a top al Qaeda informant who was coming into their base, says Mr. Boal. The man turned out to be a double agent who exploded a suicide vest, killing five CIA operatives and two contractors in late 2009. As in the film, the real Maya, played by Jessica Chastain, "really did feel a religious sense of being spared" that day to carry on the hunt, he says.

The filmmakers reconstructed the Abbottabad raid also from "firsthand" accounts. "Zero Dark Thirty" was in postproduction when the book "No Easy Day," the first direct account by a member of the SEAL team, came out last summer. In the March Esquire, the soldier who shot bin Laden describes a close and direct confrontation with the al Qaeda leader. In the movie, bin Laden isn't shown and gets shot from the stairs. Such small details aside, the movie has held up well to subsequent revelations, but Mr. Boal says he will "never ever ever ever accept this [film] will be the last word."

Mr. Boal describes the movie's final scene to illustrate the blending of fact and imagination. After identifying bin Laden's corpse, Maya boards a C-130 transport plane to head back home. "The film at the end asks—the pilot at the end asks—'Where do you want to go?' " he says. "I think that's a pretty good question. That's why I wrote it.

"I'll tell you what else I know. There was a plane. It was a C-17, not a C-130. I couldn't afford a C-17. She really did fly alone. She was crying. Did the pilot say that? I highly doubt it. That's where it becomes a movie."

Other notable Hollywood films—"All the President's Men," "The Deer Hunter"—have been topical, timely and in their day controversial. "Show me a movie about real life that isn't controversial," says Mr. Boal, "and I'll probably show you a movie that nobody really saw."

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